Part 36 (2/2)

”Menhither

Ripeness is all”

Shakespeare speaks through Lear in the last acts as plainly as through Edgar In the third scene of the fifth act Lear talks to Cordelia in the very words Shakespeare gave to the saint Henry VI at the beginning of his career Coe, and you will see the sirowth in his art

” Co like birds i' the cage: When thou dost ask iveness: so we'll live, And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues Talk of court news; ”

More characteristic still of Shakespeare is the fact that when Lear is at his bitterest in the fourth act, he shows the erotic mania which is the source of all Shakespeare's bitterness and misery; but which is utterly out of place in Lear The reader will ed in:

” Ay, every inch a king: When I do stare, see how the subject quakes

I pardon that man's life What was thy cause?

Adultery?

Thou shalt not die: die for adultery! No: The wren goes to 't, and the sht

Let copulation thrive;

Down froh woirdle do the Gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends'; ”

Thus Lear raves for a whole page: Shakespeare on his hobby: in the saan lust after Ededy is Shakespeare's understanding of his insane blind trust in s from erotic mania and from the consciousness that he is too old for love's lists Perhaps his iher than when Lear appeals to the heavens because they too are old:

” O heavens, If you do love old men, if your sweet sway Allow obedience, if yourselves are old, Make it your cause”

CHAPTER XII THE DRAMA OF DESPAIR: ”TIMON OF ATHENS”

”Ti It is not to be called a work of art, it is hardly even a tragedy; it is the causeless ruin of a soul, a ruin insufficiently enerosity If there was ever a ave so lavishly as Ti, then he deserved his fate There is no gradation in his giving, and none in his fall; no artistic crescendo The whole dra, or rather, a long curse upon all the ordinary conditions of life The highest qualities of Shakespeare are not to be found in the play There are none of the h wisdoes which are indubitably Shakespeare's, and no characterization worth ain of ”Lear,” honest and loyal beyond nature; Apeht on Shakespeare's character are given to this or that personage of the play without discrimination One phrase of Apemantus is as true of Shakespeare as of Ti:

”The middle of humanity thou never knewest, but the extreiven to Flavius: ”What viler thing upon the earth than friends Who can bring noblest minds to basest ends!”

In so far as Timon is a character at all he is ainst the world, because he finds no honesty in men, no virtue in women, evil everywhere--”boundless thefts in lis round characteristically as soon as he finds that Flavius is honest:

”Had I a steward So true, so just, and now so coerous nature mild

Let me behold thy face Surely this eneral and exceptless rashness, You perpetual-sober Gods_! I do proclaim One honestthe great and self-revealing line [Footnote: This passage is a those rejected by the commentators as un-Shakespearean: ”it does not stand the test,” says the egregious Gollancz] in italics; a line Tolstoi would, no doubt, think stupid-poht say in Tolstoi's spirit, as Lear should have known his daughters; but this is still the tragedy, which Shakespeare wishes to e

Towards the end Shakespeare speaks through Tinedly: Richard II said characteristically:

”Nor I nor anyshall be pleased, till he be eased With being nothing:”

And Timon says to Flavius: